BASQUE BALL: THE SKIN AGAINST STONE
Monday 27 October 2003
National Film Theatre, London SE1 VISIT

Showing as part of the 47th Times bfi London Film Festival, ‘Basque Ball: The Skin Against Stone’ is a fascinating documentary about the history of the Basque country, a region straddling the border between Spain and France and possessing what is believed to be the oldest language in Europe, Eskuara. Since the death of General Franco in 1975 and the reestablishment of the Republic, however, the region has been more closely associated with Basque nationalist demands for independence and the military campaign that has been conducted by ETA to try and achieve this.

Through a series of interviews with a cross section of the Basque people, including politicians, singers, academics and former ETA members who have renounced violence, director Julio Medem examines the psychology and direction of Basque nationalism and the prospects for peace in the future. Linking these are a series of shots of the beautiful landscape of the region, old archive material on Basque traditions, news footage, a match of the local handball game ‘pilota’ and even clips from "Around the world with Orson Welles,” a British TV mini-series from the mid 1950s. It is a visually absorbing journey and one that successfully opens up and explains why resolving the conflict has proved so intractable.

In Spain, ‘Basque Ball’ has become so controversial that the conservative government has even suggested it should be banned. The documentary makes clear what has upset President José Maria Aznar so much. Outside of the Basque region, Spain’s relationship with the nationalist conflict is much like Britain’s with the north of Ireland in the early 1980s – anyone who advocates ‘dialogue’ is denounced as a supporter of terrorism. In such an atmosphere, for Medem, a Basque director, to suggest that the Popular Party’s entire electoral strategy is dependent on obstructing peace and sustaining ETA’s bombing campaign is incendiary stuff. Sadly, simplistic arguments that “you are either for us or against us” have equal currency outside of Spain and are echoed in America’s ‘war on terror’, which Aznar has so enthusiastically supported.

Two important voices – the two extremes of the ETA militants and the rightwing government – are missing from the documentary, but Medem has still managed to pull together a thoroughly balanced and objective overview of the ‘Basque problem’. Amongst the many giving their testimony, perhaps the most impressive is a young activist, a member of the Socialist party, who lost a leg in an ETA car bomb attack. With perhaps the most reason for bitterness, he continues to argue passionately for talks as the only way forward – and to condemn the repression by police paramilitaries against the Basques under the previous Socialist government. In the current climate, however, with the nationalist party Batasuna banned, Basque-language newspapers closed down by the courts and an ETA cease fire brokered in 1999 at an end, the prospects for dialogue and a negotiated peace process are more remote than ever. In a sense, this makes Medem’s passionate film the more timely.

KILL BILL VOL 1
Tuesday 21 October 2003
UCI Whiteleys, London W2 VISIT

Whilst the reviews for Quentin Tarantino’s long-awaited fourth film have been almost universally positive (except for the inevitable Daily Mail tirades against what is undoubtedly a very violent movie), one has to wonder whether a director other than the revered Tarantino would have got off so lightly for such a sloppy effort.

Divided into chapters, ‘Kill Bill’ begins promisingly enough, with a vengeful former assassin known as The Bride (Uma Thurman) in a furious knife fight with Copperhead, once a fellow member of the Deadly Vipers Assassination Squad that betrayed her and left for dead at the Bride’s El Paso wedding. There is a great moment when their crunching duel in a now decimated suburban home is interrupted by the arrival of a yellow school bus and the return of Copperhead’s young daughter. Not even the disturbing idea of a child watching her mother’s execution can stop the Bride’s mission, however. We then discover that the Bride has recently awoken from a four-year coma to find a metal plate in her head, her unborn baby gone, her body defiled by revolting hospital staff and the threat of death hanging over her. She has no choice but to exact her revenge or face death herself.

The problem is this: Tarantino, who famously decided to split the film into two because he couldn’t decide what to cut, should never have been so readily indulged by his producers at Miramax. It’s bad enough that the limited dialogue, meant as a homage to action films of the Seventies, is laboured and often cringe-making. But once the first chapter is over, the pace of the film just grinds to a halt. What follows is a slow chapter involving the creation of a unique samurai sword in Okinawa, that in turn is meant to be ‘comic’ (it isn’t) and a homage to Hong Kong action films (that is poorly executed). Next comes an explanation of the background of the Bride’s next target, O-Ren Ishii / Cottonmouth, told as a Japanese anime cartoon that is a deeply unpleasant bloodbath and rather an unsubtle reminder that all the violence in ‘Kill Bill’ is meant to be cartoon violence.

There is no denying, however, that the final showdown between the Bride and hordes of sword-wielding yakuza is brilliantly staged – and spectacularly violent, so much so that it will be way too much for many people. It’s just that, once again, this stylised battle drags on for far too long. And then, with more hints dropped and at the moment that the audience finally starts to get interested in what happens next, the film suddenly ends and we have to wait until next April for the conclusion. Let’s be honest – if anyone other than Tarantino had tried this, they would have been rightly panned.

If you see volume one, you will inevitably want to see whether the complete story is better than the sum of its parts. Personally, I have my doubts and I’m also sceptical that ‘Kill Bill’ will attract the cult status of either Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction. The latter in particular is a sharper, more watchable film. 'Kill Bill' undoubtedly has flashes of inspiration but is largely a mess - one that buckets of blood simply cannot hide.

FINDING NEMO
Tuesday 14 October 2003
Stratford Picture House, London E15 VISIT

There is a reason why grownups enjoy and will go and see the two Toy Story films and Shrek but not Treasure Planet or Lion King, although all are Disney movies. The x-factor is filmmakers Pixar, whose continuing ability to produce visually stunning animation coupled with excellent story-telling and characterisation is once again demonstrated in ‘Finding Nemo’, their latest film.

The simple story revolves around clown fish Marlin, who in a surprisingly downbeat opening to the film loses all his family save one son, Nemo, who is born with a weak fin. Marlin is both fiercely protective and also extremely fearful of the ocean beyond the coral reef. When Nemo rebels against his father’s cautious nature and is scooped up by an Australian scuba diver, Marlin must overcome his fears and, with the help of a forgetful fish called Dory, travel to Sydney and rescue his son from a dentist’s reception fish tank. On the way, they encounters Aussie sharks, surfer dude turtles and the terrors of a deep water angler fish and clouds of deadly jellyfish, whilst Nemo’s fellow captives plot their escape.

As is the case with other Pixar films, the attention to detail in the animation is remarkable, but the greater possibilities that are offered by the patterns of light and water currents of an undersea world have been exploited to the full. Equally impressive are the cast providing the voices, especially Albert Brooks as Marlin and Ellen DeGeneres as Dory. And while ‘Finding Nemo’ may not have as many nods to the adults in the audience as, say, Shrek, with some moments that teeter on the point of sentimentality, scenes like the destruction of the dentist’s office or Dory’s attempts to communicate with whales are as funny as anything that Pixar has yet come up with.

This film will be packed next week during the half-term break so wait until the popcorn has been swept away and the little terrors have left before checking it out for yourself. You’ll never look at a plate of fish and chips in the same way again.

THE ITALIAN JOB
Saturday 11 October 2003
UGC Crawley, East Sussex VISIT

So on Saturday, I’m down in Sussex to visit my brother Mark, his girlfriend Bianca and my delightful nephew Leon, now nearly 20 months old. The little’un was visiting his grandparents, so his parents had an evening off, an opportunity for Mark to see his first film at the cinema since January. Oh, and for me to see my forty-fourth.

On an occasion such as this, what a hard-pressed parent probably needs is a more memorable film than a critically scorned remake of ‘The Italian Job’, but it looked like fun. And in truth, it’s not really a remake at all. With the exception of the red, white and blue Minis, a traffic gridlock and a character who happens to be called Charlie Croker (Mark Wahlberg), the plot of the 1960s classic has been abandoned and relocated to Los Angeles rather than Milan. After a perfect job in Venice, the gang of thieves is double-crossed by one of their number, Frank (Edward Norton), who shoots and kills Charlie’s ageing mentor (Donald Sutherland). The remainder of the film concerns their efforts to steal back the gold taken by Frank with the help of Charlize Theron’s expert safe cracker.

Whilst the action is diverting enough, it’s not all that special and considering that the original was made over 30 years ago, many of its stunts were superior and carried out with greater wit. It’s a wonder the director didn’t choose to steal them to make a better film (the car chase on the roof of the Fiat factory, for instance). But the bigger, more fundamental problem is the standard of the acting. Mark Wahlberg, who has proven again and again that he cannot carry a leading role (Planet of the Apes, anyone?), has none of the charisma of Michael Caine or, say, Brad Pitt and George Clooney in Ocean’s Eleven, a properly executed heist film. Charlize Theron has little to do but look gorgeous, which she does well – but her acting is pretty one-dimensional. Surprisingly it is the supporting cast, Mos Def, Jason Statham and particularly Seth Green, who have the most fun and the best lines.

Unlike Pierce Brosnan’s updated Thomas Crown Affair, this is one of those occasions where the original version of a film turns out to be vastly superior to its modern equivalent. This new ‘Italian Job’ is just an average and largely inoffensive thriller with a tidy ending that is embarrassingly lame when compared to the original’s literal cliffhanger.

Still, it was good to see my brother and his family. Hopefully he’ll get a babysitter when Return of the King comes out on December 19. The trailer looked fabulous.

GOODBYE LENIN!
Saturday 4 October 2003
Stratford Picture House, London E15 VISIT

For some reason, I was expecting from the trailer that ‘Goodbye Lenin!’ would be knockabout, laugh out loud physical comedy but instead it was often dark and thoughtful satire on German reunification and the manipulation of reality.

The film tells the story of Alexander Kerner, an East German whose staunchly socialist mother Christiane suffers a heart attack and falls into a coma after witnessing the arrest of her son in pro-democracy protests in 1989. After eight months, Christiane suddenly awakens but her doctors insist that if she has any chance of survival, she must avoid any excitement. However, since the Berlin Wall has subsequently collapsed and the GDR no longer exists, Alex fears the sudden changes in the world his mother once knew may lead to another, fatal heart attack. He is convinced that if she stays in hospital, someone will inadvertently reveal the truth. So he takes her home and pretends that nothing has changed, recreating the GDR in their flat with the help of his neighbours and setting in train an ever more complex lie that becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

For all of Alex’s efforts to insulate his mother from the outside world, its gradual encroachment makes for moments of fine comedy. Most notable is the moment when a Coca Cola banner is unfurled on the outside of a neighbouring tower block and one of Alex’s co-conspirators, an elderly neighbour, says, “what were the comrades thinking!” But the film is interesting too because it suggests that the rapid disappearance of the GDR left many of its citizens not only poorer but also lacking a clear identity, as though they had been taken over rather than welcomed into the new Germany. Alex’s attempts to explain the sudden influx of Western cars and billboards, pretending they belong to ‘refugees from the West’, eventually leads to a staged reunification of Germany, intended to bring the faked reality he has created to a close. But with the help of hilarious fake TV news programmes made by his filmmaker friend Denis and assistance from his childhood hero, cosmonaut Sigmund John, who has been reduced to driving a taxi, the GDR ends not perhaps the hero but certainly not the villain. ‘Goodbye Lenin!’ suggests that for many, particularly the older generation, a gradual transformation of the GDR would have been the way they felt change should have happened.

There are many great moments in this film, some very funny and some really very moving. But there is also one thing I noticed that seemed odd: Denis the filmmaker is shown at one point wearing what looks like a Matrix T-shirt – in 1990? Was this just a cock up or a sly comment by the director on the idea of creating a fake reality? Never mind. ‘Goodbye Lenin!’ is another fascinating film that has subtitles and is still very enjoyable. Make a point of seeing it.